Industrial controllers and their associated I/O devices are central to the operation of modern automation systems. These controllers interact with field devices on the plant floor to control automated processes relating to such objectives as product manufacture, material handling, batch processing, supervisory control, and other such applications. Industrial controllers store and execute user-defined control programs to effect decision-making in connection with the controlled process. Such programs can include, but are not limited to, ladder logic, sequential function charts, function block diagrams, structured text, or other such programming structures. In general, industrial controllers read input data from sensors and metering devices that provide discreet and telemetric data regarding one or more states of the controlled system, and generate control outputs based on these inputs in accordance with the user-defined program.
In addition to industrial controllers and their associated I/O devices, some industrial automation systems may also include low-level control systems, such as vision systems, barcode marking systems, variable frequency drives, industrial robots, and the like which perform local control of portions of the industrial process, or which have their own localized control systems.
A given industrial enterprise may comprise a large number industrial assets distributed across multiple facilities. These assets may comprise one or more industrial devices operating in conjunction to carry out respective industrial applications (e.g., batch processing, material handling, automated product assembly, quality checks, die casting, etc.). The large number of industrial assets that can make up an industrial enterprise, together with the often continuous operation of those assets, results in generation of a vast amount of potentially useful data across the enterprise. In addition to production statistics, data relating to machine health, alarm statuses, operator feedback (e.g., manually entered reason codes associated with a downtime condition), electrical or mechanical load over time, and the like are often monitored, and in some cases recorded, on a continuous basis. This data is generated by the many industrial devices that can make up a given automation system, including the industrial controller and its associated I/O, telemetry devices for near real-time metering, motion control devices (e.g., drives for controlling the motors that make up a motion system), visualization applications, lot traceability systems (e.g., barcode tracking), etc. Moreover, since many industrial facilities operate on a 24-hour basis, their associated automation systems can generate a vast amount of potentially useful data at high rates. For an enterprise with multiple plant facilities, the amount of generated automation data further increases.
Collective analysis of enterprise-wide data collected from multiple production areas and industrial facilities of an industrial enterprise could yield useful insights into overall plant operations. However, access to the industrial data is typically limited to applications and devices that share a common network with the industrial controllers that collect and generate the data. As such, plant personnel wishing to leverage the industrial data generated by their systems in another application (e.g., a reporting or analysis tool, notification system, visualization application, backup data storage, etc.) are required to maintain such applications on-site using local resources. Moreover, although a given industrial enterprise may comprise multiple plant facilities at geographically diverse locations (or multiple mobile systems having variable locations), the scope of such applications is limited only to data available on controllers residing on the same local network as the application.
Also, given the disparate nature of the industrial devices in use at a given industrial facility, data generated by these devices may conform to several different data types and formats which may not be mutually compatible, rendering collective analysis difficult.
The above-described deficiencies of today's industrial control systems are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with conventional systems and corresponding benefits of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following description.